The Thirteenth Skull

It was around five o’clock and nearly dark. They dumped me on the bed and the lock went snick. I listened to the absolute silence—if you can listen to absolute silence.

Dr. Mingus had a funny accent, thick and slushy. Tiny beads of spit hung on his sliver-thin lower lip as he talked.

This will go easily enough, if you cooperate. We’ll take some measurements, run a few nonintrusive tests, sample a bit of your blood . . .

Beneath the château, behind a sealed metal door, at the bottom of a flight of stairs was a medical complex. Operating rooms. Examination rooms. A room with a gleaming white CT scan machine. And other rooms I didn’t get to look in, though I may have been inside them, because Dr. Mingus gave me a shot that put me under, I’m not sure for how long, but it seemed like a very long time. I don’t know what he did to me while I was out. I just know when I came to he was just beaming, like a little kid who had found a special surprise under the Christmas tree, and I was feeling like a scooped-out pumpkin from a different, darker holiday.

In cabin thirteen, I buried my face in the pillow.

I am a genetic engineer, Alfred. Do you know what a genetic engineer does?

Needles extending from syringes the size of my wrist. Vials of dark, arterial blood—my blood—rows of them, each with a different colored label: Spec Ops . . . GDT . . . Sofa . . . That last one confused me, but it was about the tenth he drained out of me and my vision was pretty blurry by that point. Sofa? What the heck was Sofa?

This is very exciting. The most significant development in the field in my lifetime. In anyone’s lifetime, Alfred! You are at the center of the most astounding breakthrough since Watson and Crick cracked the code!

Dr. Mingus injected me with something that made me feel very good, sleepy, and floaty. His wide face swam in and out of focus as he leaned over me. I was tied to a gurney and they were wheeling me toward the room with the big scanner.

This will not hurt, Alfred, but you must remain very still while we image your brain. Have you ever had a CT scan before? It’s not painful.

As I lay inside the scanner I think I heard Nueve’s voice and the name “Sofia,” but I told myself I was dreaming or hallucinating, but it reminded me of Samuel. He was my guardian and he had sworn to protect me. Where was he? And who was going to protect me now?

After the scan, I looked up into Dr. Mingus’s face and whispered, Am I done?

For today. Tomorrow we have a few more tests. I’m going to need some tissue samples. Tell me, Alfred, have you ever had an operation?

They were going to put me under, open me up, and take samples of all my major organs. Dr. Mingus was particularly interested in my heart . . . He was going to slice out a piece of my heart.

You are blessed, Alfred Kropp. Do you believe that?

As he slid a needle into my groin.

A gift to all mankind . . .

As he shined a blinding light into my eyes.

The power of life, yes?

Like some horrible Halloween mask, his face. Wide and flat and blank. He barely had any eyebrows and his eyes were black, death-dark eyes, like a shark’s. The only expression I saw in them the whole time reminded me of a kid I knew in Ohio who enjoyed burning ants with a magnifying glass. The truly scary thing is there’s a lot of Dr. Minguses running around in the world, but I had the Dr. Mingus-iest of them all. He didn’t just like his work and he more than loved it. Like Nueve, he was his work.

The power of God himself . . .

The pillow on my bed smelled of lavender. Spit ran out my open mouth and I breathed that in, the smell of spit, the smell of lavender.

They brought me into the last room, the worst room, where a dentist’s chair was anchored to the floor. The two goons dragged me across the tile floor and my toe scraped across the metal drain cover in the middle of the room. They threw me into the chair and tightened straps across my arms and over my ankles. Dr. Mingus swung the chair around and brought his face very close to mine. His breath smelled very sweet, as sweet as cotton candy, and my stomach rolled.

One last test for the day, Alfred, more for my own benefit than science’s, for I am curious and I will confess a little skeptical. Like a Missourian, I wish to see it with my own eyes.

He stepped away and I saw Ashley standing between the two stone-faced goons. They were holding her arms out from her sides. I was still pretty dopey from the shot, and at first I thought I was hallucinating. What I was seeing couldn’t be what I was seeing.

Dr. Mingus stepped between me and Ashley, but I could see her face over his shoulder—she was at least a head taller than him—and I could also see what he held in his right hand.

A scalpel.

I jerked in the chair. The straps yanked me back. Mingus’s shoulder hunched and pivoted forward as he shoved the scalpel into the middle of Ashley’s chest.

Then he pushed the blade straight down toward her belly button. Her knees buckled, but the two guys kept her on her feet.

Mingus stepped away. Ashley’s chin dropped to her chest. A swirl of blond hair and the drip-drip-drip of her blood splattering on the cold tile, forming rivulets that ran toward the metal drain, and I remember thinking, Oh, that’s why there’s a drain in the floor.

Mingus turned to me.

Show me the gift.

Candy-breath, whispering.

Show me the power of God!

He cut a four-inch-long groove into my palm, threw off the straps, and flung me out of the chair. The men holding Ashley stepped away, and she crumpled to the floor as if in slow motion, coming to rest on her side, curled up like I was curled up now on my little bed in my little cabin, breathing in lavender and the smell of my own spit.

I crawled to her.

Her eyes were open, but I saw no spark of life in them.

Then a voice I had heard before whispered inside my head, Beloved!

My vision clouded. I was seeing her through a white film, a mist of shadow and light.

My beloved . . .

Something familiar and warm had come to me—or was it always there? I had felt it first in Merlin’s Cave, a being at once intimate and alien, so familiar but at the same time so terrifyingly different. The Sword of Kings, the gift passed down by heaven’s hands, was in this world but not of this world, my father had told me, and so was this presence around me now, between me and Ashley, joining me to Ashley.

Lying beside her, I pressed my bleeding hand into the gaping wound in her chest, and with my other hand I smoothed the blond hair away from her face.

In the name of Saint Michael . . .

I couldn’t feel the floor beneath me. I was floating in the white cloud. I was still in that room but also in a different place, a place where Mingus and the OIPEP Mafia couldn’t go. A still place that didn’t touch any other place on earth. A place with no center.